No Small Victory

Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Some smug anti-environmentalists have been known to cite the concern in the 1980s as an example of how science creates terrifying scenarios from time to time that get lots of media attention, only to forget about them when the next big thing comes along. Whatever happened to THAT, they laugh?

Well, as it turns out, the scientists had it exactly right: In the mid-1980s, they found a dangerous thinning of the layer in the stratosphere that protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun, mostly caused by the use of chemicals in aerosols and refrigeration. And science gave us a solution. Nearly 200 countries signed the Montreal Protocol, which phased out the use of those chemicals.

Today, 35 years later, it’s “one of the great environmental success stories of our time,” PBS said recently: There has been “steady and promising recovery of the ozone layer.” It is expected to be fully restored by 2040 at the current rate.

It’s a case where humans caused a massive, potentially disastrous environmental problem — life on Earth depends on the ozone layer being intact — and then those same humans came up with a solution. One that worked. It’s both a cautionary tale and something to celebrate. And it’s one more thing: a reminder that we can reverse seemingly enormous damage if we are committed to it.

There’s another example, locally: the burgeoning osprey population. It shows how devastating humans can be to the world around them, but also how much potential there is for positive change when we put our minds to it.

Around the same time as the ozone layer was discovered to be in jeopardy, the East End’s iconic raptors had all but disappeared: There were believed to be about 100 left. It was a decline directly attributable to the use of DDT, an insecticide that damaged the osprey’s eggshells, from the 1950s through the 1970s. Development began taking away more and more unspoiled nesting sites near the water. It took a toll: Osprey were listed as endangered in New York State in 1976.

Once DDT was banned, there was a slow but steady rebound: Seven years later, they were “threatened,” and by 1995 there were 230 healthy breeding pairs on Long Island. But on the East End, where the osprey had long patrolled the waters, environmentalists led the effort to create and protect nesting sites. Utility companies joined the campaign.

The result has been astonishing. By 2014, the number of active nests on the East End was 199. Last summer, the Group for the East End monitored 477 in the region’s five towns. Some 500 fledglings are leaving those nests each summer these days to learn to hunt in local waters.

It’s no small victory. And, as Bob DeLuca of the Group for the East End noted, “When those species start to do better, it’s a broad indicator that the ecosystem itself is a healthier, more functional system that needs less help from us.”

Beyond that, though, there’s an important lesson: We can undo the damage we’ve done. It takes time, it takes concerted effort, it takes commitment. But in a generation or two, a damaged ecosystem can be reversed.

As the region faces other crises, this is a timely lesson as well. Take water quality: The decimation of the scallop population looks nearly like a lost cause after several years of dire results in the fall harvest. It might be tempting to begin accepting that the Peconic bay scallop is destined to disappear as climate change worsens the conditions that already exist in local waterways.

When we start to lose hope, think of the osprey now soaring in greater and greater numbers over the bays — joined, now, spectacularly, by a growing number of bald eagles — and remember that it seemed similarly bleak just a few years back. Humans can really mess things up, but we can fix things, too — if we really want to.